PowerPoint to Markdown
Turn a .pptx deck into clean Markdown, slide by slide. Every slide title becomes a numbered ## Slide 3: heading, bullets keep the indent levels set in PowerPoint, tables stay tables, and speaker notes come across as a blockquote you can switch on or off. It runs entirely in your browser and shows the token comparison before you paste anything into a chatbot.
Drag & drop a .pptx file, or click to browse
Every slide becomes a numbered Markdown heading, with nested bullets, real tables and speaker notes intact. Your deck is read inside your browser and never uploaded.
Why convert slides to Markdown before asking an AI about them?
Handing a chatbot a deck is harder than handing it a document, because a slide has no reading order. A .pptx is a ZIP of XML in which every text box is an independent shape with its own position on a canvas. Extract that naively and you get a pile of disconnected phrases: no headings, no idea which bullet sat under which, no slide boundaries, and table cells strung out one per line with no columns. The model can read the words but cannot see the deck.
Markdown fixes that with a handful of characters every model has seen millions of times in training. That is why powerpoint to markdown for ai workflows have caught on for anyone pasting decks into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek or Grok - it is the cheapest way to reduce tokens for ai with markdown while keeping the structure the model needs. This converter shows you the estimated before-and-after count for your own file rather than asking you to take it on faith.
The slide numbering matters more than it sounds. Because each heading is written as <slideex/>, you can ask “what does slide 5 claim about EMEA?” and the model knows exactly where to look. Numbers always match the original deck, so slide 5 here is slide 5 in PowerPoint even when hidden slides are left out of the output.
What this converter actually preserves
- Slide titles, read from the real title placeholder in the slide XML (
<p:ph type="title">) rather than guessed from font size, so a big bold text box is not mistaken for a heading. - Nested bullets, at the level PowerPoint stored them (
<a:pPr lvl="2">), indented so every Markdown parser reads sub-bullets as children rather than siblings. Auto-numbered lists come out as numbered lists. - Tables, as GitHub-flavoured Markdown tables. Pipe characters inside a cell are escaped, merged cells stay in the grid as blanks so the columns never shift, and every row is padded to the same width.
- Speaker notes, as a labelled blockquote under each slide - a ppt to markdown with speaker notes conversion that you can turn off in one click when you only want what was on screen.
- Images, extracted as real image files and referenced by filename, bundled with the .md in a ZIP.
- Hyperlinks, as
[text](url), and partial bold or italic inside a line.
Things a slide can hold that Markdown genuinely cannot - charts, SmartArt diagrams, and text baked into a picture - are marked with a placeholder and listed in the per-slide breakdown. Nothing is dropped silently: the breakdown tab tells you at a glance which slides converted cleanly and which were only ever a picture.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Markdown use fewer tokens than the raw slide text?
Two reasons, and this tool measures both for your own file. First, a naive dump keeps everything a deck accumulates - blank paragraphs, repeated slide-number and footer chrome, and hidden backup slides you never actually present. This converter drops them. Second, structure that would otherwise cost a paragraph of explanation is encoded in one or two characters: # for a heading, - for a bullet, | for a table column. Counts are an estimate of roughly four characters per token, not a specific model's tokenizer.
Is my presentation uploaded to a server?
No. The .pptx is unzipped and its XML parsed entirely in your browser, and the images are extracted in memory. Nothing is sent anywhere, which means you can convert an internal board deck, a client pitch or an unreleased roadmap without a data-handling conversation.
What happens to speaker notes?
They are read from the deck's notes pages and written under each slide as a blockquote labelled Speaker notes, so a model can tell what you said out loud apart from what was on screen. There is a toggle to leave them out entirely - useful when you want the model to see only what the audience saw.
Are nested bullets really kept, or flattened?
Really kept. PowerPoint stores an outline level on every paragraph, and this converter maps that level directly to Markdown list indentation, up to nine levels deep. A sub-bullet stays a child of the bullet above it.
Can it open .ppt files from PowerPoint 97-2003?
No, only the modern .pptx (and .pptm) format. The old .ppt format is a binary container that cannot be read in a browser. Open the file in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides and save it as .pptx first - the tool tells you this instead of failing silently if you drop a .ppt or an .odp on it.